SI Archives Part 6: Hearts and Minds
by Guardian54
Summary: This is the 2190 edition of SI Archives Part 6, archives of the Psychic Dominator Disaster, of truths that were told over 200 years after the fact, of the consequences of this event, and more. This was the first generally acknowledged Reaper interference with human history (evangelists still deny that Jesus was the first, and Yuri his Second Coming). This is the truth.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: A major note here: Yuri looks about as much like Jesus as Voldemort looks like school-aged Tom Riddle, particularly because Mary was a Veela (son genetically shouldn't be as ugly as Yuri). This is why the succubi are portrayed as evil and the other main strain of the same psionic-based race, the strain with bat wings and a spade-tipped tail, whereas angels have feathered wings as per the feathered strain of the race. The rest of the explanatory verbal diarrhea is at the end of chapter A/N and will be reiterated in _Harmony Shepard and the Holy Grail_ (my revamp of Harry Potter year 6).

* * *

Chapter 1: Live Free or Die Hard

_April 30, 1984_

"…Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you… the T-1984A!" Jane Shepard waved her hand as the tarp fell, revealing the labs' latest innovation in armoured warfare.

The crowd looked contemplative of the design, but did not seem altogether too impressed as they had been when the first models of the vehicles from the T-1942 through T-1965 had been unveiled. Although the gun mount block was larger than in previous vehicles, the tank was considerably smaller than its predecessor in the four-tracked assault tank role, the T-1955. The old-fashioned "one-ten" currently installed in the gun block was planned to be replaced by the A-WTC-130-55A currently still in development. The design had studied some of the more advantageous elements of the Soviet tanks they'd faced over the years, namely the smaller profile, lighter weight and greater tactical and strategic mobility, and incorporated them. However, this meant large cuts to crew comfort compared to the previous tanks and the driver, instead of somewhat sitting, was mostly lying down now, taking inspiration from the British Chieftain. To retain comfortable driver view range when unbuttoned together with reasonable hull down ability, the engine block was rear-placed for the first time in SI tank design since the incorporation of the four-track-pod arrangement and composite armour. The turret barbette—it was more a shaft than a ring, which meant ripping the turret off with a non-penetrating kinetic force was incredibly hard—was centered halfway down the length of the tank instead of two-thirds of the way down as a result.

The armour of the new tank was, if fired on within a fifty-degree frontal arc (25 to either side), designed to (with standard arrangements outside the main armour) be immune to the alpha strike of the A-WTC-150-60 firing standard tungsten carbide APFSDS ammunition, though a second hit within the afflicted area of the first would generally go through. Tungsten carbide had been the old standard that had returned to the cutting edge after the Chrono Restriction meant the US set aside their projects involving depleted uranium ammunition, though additional composites were to be included in the rounds to improve strength to catch up to tank armouring advances. The rear was to be thoroughly immune to 40mm armour-piercing slugs, but that was it for the rear armour against kinetic energy penetrators. Against HEAT shells however the spaced rear armour, coupled with both cage/slats AND Minimal Reactive Armour, a thin form of reactive armour fitted on TOP of the slats, were almost as effective as anywhere else and could defeat tandem-charge warheads. This was by benefit of the slats being very explosion resistant by relatively minimal profile to explosions (if they were slimmer and sharpened they'd practically be blades), so they could survive the thin MRA going off, then set off or abruptly halt the progress of the main warhead. Regardless, the main warhead would still be detonated some distance away from the outer armour layer, which had real ERA attached, and thus be ineffective. The rest of the tank's sides and top was also fitted with this MRA-slat-ERA rig outside the main armour. The lack of a full-scale double bottom, to cut down greatly on hull profile height, meant it was less mine-resistant than previous SI-built tanks, but the honeycombed hull bottom construction along with ERA attachments meant it had a good level of resistance for its size. HEAT mines would be resisted by the ERA, and any mine that would be able to do real damage by weight of explosive would probably have knocked the vehicle out by wrecking the suspension with the ensuing crash back to the ground or otherwise turning it on its side/back anyhow.

In terms of weight, whereas previous SI generations had all been heavy compared to their counterparts, this compact vehicle weighed in at vaguely under 47 tons fully combat-ready (factoring in weight of current WTC-130-55 prototypes, the T-1984B would weigh a couple hundred kg more, just over 47 tons) compared to the XM1 design in America that was rapidly nearing 70 tons. Thus for mobility, it could cut down from the traditional 1500 horsepower diesel SI tanks had used for generations to a significantly more compact 1000-horsepower diesel (which made maintenance still reasonably easy despite the shorter hull) while still maintaining a comparable horsepower per ton ratio. More importantly, the lower weight and ground pressure gave better traction than previous models on all but the hardest ground where it matched them, so cross-country mobility was actually better despite the lower power per ton.

On the same day, after the unveiling ceremony where the tank was shown to foreign dignitaries (without telling them the above stats, of course) Jane got an update from the fighter design team that said the F-1984 was an estimated 2 months from completion, this was a bit earlier than expected, most likely due to some breakthrough or other with the project. Jane didn't mind the designers' vagueness in the report, after all, it was important to keep some things classified.

It was that evening that Hannah would approach her sister with the first inkling of a desire for a movement that would spread their ideals further and bring hope and some level of power to more of the downtrodden of the world. In a way, Bush would later be right to accuse SI of starting the Global Liberation Army, but for this day the older sister merely lectured the younger on the reports she had been getting of a system that gave practically feudalism in China. For the record, though, this particular conversation had nothing directly to do with how the book "Zhong Guo Nong Min Diao Cha" ("Chinese Peasantry Report", literally) translated to English as "_Will the Boat Sink the Water?_" became one of the mandatory readings for every GLA recruit after it was published in 2003, though the subject matter was the same.

The sisters did plan for a direct, clandestine evaluation (Jane STILL did not know why changing her hair and facial tensions was enough to get by in a crowd, she would come to learn later on from Yuriko that it was a desire not to be noticed, radiated outward as Psionic energy) to be made over the next two years under the guise of reviewing the demobilization of wartime industries to make sure their system was fare more difficult to exploit, but those plans ended the very next day. Fortunately they later discovered that, much to their relief, the fact that their economy was not top-down ordained in anything but war production and market regulations made it much more difficult to game. Wealth hardened human hearts, but it seemed much less effective against those whom seemed to stand as if outside time and the world looking inward, well, the sisters hoped it would turn out that way, at least.

* * *

_May 1, 1984_

"We are now at DEFCON 2" Lieutenant Eva was saying from the screen as Dugan entered the briefing room at the White House that evening.

"What the devil is going on Lieutenant? Is Shepard getting this feed?"

"He's surfaced, Mr. President, I'm sure you all recognize this man." She brought up the intel photo of Yuri "We know him only as Yuri, fugitive advisor to Soviet Premier Romanov. While we were busy fighting the Soviets, Yuri was apparently using his mind-control technology to establish a secret army of his own. A group of Yuri's Initiates purchased Alcatraz Island in San Francisco last year, and they've constructed some sort of device in the meantime."

On a separate screen, Hannah Shepard turned to her adjutants "Take us to DEFCON 1, Retarget one of our Sector 1 ICBM silos to San Francisco, arm the missile and fire immediately. Authorization Code Horace-Earwig-Aneurysm-Rifle-Tantalum." The solid-fuel missiles only needed programming and opening the silo doors before they could be fired after all. Sector 1 was the Canadian Atlantic provinces.

"Are you insane Shepard? If that missile destroys San Francisco…" Dugan stared at his once-friend, feeling a sudden cold dread and betrayal almost as bad as Romanov's stunt at the beginning of the last war had brought. His political career was already effectively over since his rival Reagan had been campaigning for a hard line against the USSR and everyone else who did not align with the US. Reagan had lost the last elections, but Dugan doubted he could get a second term given how anti-Soviet the American populace today was.

"What kind of device?" Hannah asked snappishly.

Yuri's transmission showed up on one of Eva's screens and Eva switched over to it "Perhaps I can explain Mr. President."

"Yuri…" Dugan put one leg up over the other and reclined somewhat in his seat.

"The device is called the Psychic Dominator. There is a network of such devices spread across the globe."

Dugan frowned "More of your mind-control tricks?"

"No tricks, Mr. President, in a few moments I will unleash a tidal wave of Psychic energy designed to dominate the minds of an entire planet. There will be no more 'free will', only my will."

"And what will you do with it? Heh, you crazies never think of the next step, world domination, then what, exactly? Control the world… and make them all do jumping jacks or something?" Hannah then proceeded to laugh at Yuri's unhappy face and smack her hand on her desk.

Dugan on the other hand took a smiling approach "Yuri… Yuri… Yuri… The war's over! Can't we all just… get along? What if I was to give you a full presidential pardon? Your country needs a leader, it could be you."

Yuri shook his head "Why should I be content to lead one nation, if I can control the whole world, Mr. President?"

Hannah switched off her transmitting functions, then turned to her adjutants "Prepare to launch everything, but maximize flight time to twenty minutes for all missiles. Authorization Exception-Neutral-Doublet." She knew that once prepped correctly, the override codes of the missiles could be input at one console in her HQ, only a few people knew the codes, and she could defend that one console from all her staff if need be given its location. _If this is the way the world ends, it ends with a bang._

"You can't threaten us! We're the most powerful nation on Earth!" Dugan snapped. "We did win the war, you know."

"Did you? Indeed, I think not…"

"Mr. President, something's happening, the device is beginning to deploy." Evan switched to an aerial feed from a news chopper routed to the site, watching in the San Francisco dusk.

"Call in an air-strike, I want that tower taken out before Shepard's missile gets there." Dugan hoped he could spare San Francisco from a nuke, but he knew full well that to preserve the world, Shepard would have no problem burning quite a number of cities. He still remembered, as a child, seeing footage of the soldiers on the Niigata Line, sobbing while manning their weapons and gunning down the hordes of often unarmed Japanese civilians herded toward their positions by Japanese soldiers waiting for their positions to run out of ammo. He respected the woman for doing what had to be done, but also despised her for not doing things in a more peaceful way, convincing the Japanese civilians at least to surrender should have been possible after Hokkaido was taken "Hannah, you still there?"

"I have relocated to the SI Missile Command Centre and am alone down here, Jane has been alerted of the possible problem and authorized code changes. I am the only one with the codes to fire, change the trajectories of the missiles or deactivate them, and if need be I can fire everything from here even without the cooperation of silo operators, using override codes. We have alerted the Chinese and they are preparing all their missiles similarly, with impact timers to be synchronized with ours. You have four minutes to get that building out of San Francisco or we will have to burn it, and if Yuri's mad scheme actually works, then… we will have to purge all of his installations by nuclear fire… and hope that there is enough of humanity and the planet left to rebuild after this bit of nuclear chemotherapy against this cancer."

Dugan knew that logically, this was the only choice, preventing the world from falling into a lunatic's hands at all costs. "Understood Shepard, we have aircraft en route as we speak." Two minutes later, the mass of Allied VTOL Harriers that had been scrambled as soon as Yuri's device had been discovered fired their missiles at five kilometres, using forced reprogramming for the anti-air missiles (the fighter airbases inside the US didn't stock enough air-to-ground munitions as fighters naturally were defensive craft) to add to their already considerable anti-ground firepower and proceeded in for a gun strike. The point defence weapons of the island came online and threw up an enormous screen of flak that intercepted most of the missiles, but some inevitably leaked through the Gatling-style rotary guns' screen. They smashed into the Psychic Dominator's armoured shell, and since it was open… the top part collapsed as it lost levitation symmetry with the chains failing on one side but not the other. It would require quite a bit of repairs before it could be brought to function again, repairs it would not be getting if the Allies had anything to say about it.

* * *

"An allied airstrike has damaged one of our power plants and the device itself on Alcatraz Island, it will not function." An operator, an enthralled, mindless drone, droned (as fitting of his status) to Yuri.

"Fire the other devices, the time has come to activate them." Yuri flipped a switch and four control bars emerged from a console. He began the activation sequences for the Cairo and Antarctica devices, then engaged the Japan device.

* * *

"Mr. President, we're detecting huge shockwaves of energy across the globe." Eva reported, showing the activation sites of various psychic-based devices around the world.

"My God… the maniac's really gonna do it!" Dugan said, putting his fists down on the long meeting table. "May God help us all…"

* * *

There were several problems Yuri hadn't previously comprehended with psychic energy being used in such an absolute, irreversible way: It is not possible to have even the technologically vastly amplified mind power of one actually manage to control billions on singular terms. The best he could do, Yuri quickly realized as the devices started going off around the globe, was give general orders to huge mobs. The other huge problem was that to make it irreversible he had to assimilate their knowledge and memories into himself to fully bend them permanently to him. As his cybernetically augmented head began to pound under the amount of useless information that came with every mind to fully fall under his thrall Yuri doubled over, vomiting his guts out onto the floor before slapping around on the surface of the table for a command that might cease further activations. He finally hit it and curled up on his side, moaning. Perhaps this was why he hadn't tried anything larger than a city during the war… except that Psychic Amplifier which was made to serve as a continental-scale Psychic Beacon. Even the Psychic Beacons were reversible and didn't require assimilation of the targets' information.

"Ponies… ponies everywhere…" He muttered, shuddering. _I should have just gone with a bunch of those instead_, he decided as he hauled himself up from where he'd lain in his own vomit, _instead of using the more advanced and irreversible technology. At least most of them are only under Psychic Beacon control, if I have to review one more Masaii's spear-flinging lessons from a tribe elder, or one more woman's perspective of the stifling inside of a niqab I'm going to see if there's a setting on the Cairo device to just fry all their minds, less suffering at least for me with the latter group's memories of being in the desert sun, guess that explains why they're holed up in their homes a lot, it fucking bakes… Don't even get me started on the amount of butterflies and unicorns from young girls in Westernized nations, the flocks and herds are still storming around inside my head… ugh…_

* * *

In other words, nothing major happened to most of the populace except in areas that didn't receive SIN like Japan, didn't believe in mind control, or were too close to the Psychic Dominators like Egypt. SIN had been partly livecasting regarding Yuri's broadcasts and Dugan's airstrike commands to various sectors (but not the prepared Allied nuclear response), arousing mass panic as people barricaded themselves into their homes, but also mass paranoia and emotional agitation, the best counter for Psychic attack. That was according to the broadcast which surprisingly most of the populace, even during the barricading, were calm enough to be able to hear and listen to regarding mental defensive exercises. Experimental countermeasures, never before tested, were brought out and tested for the first time. They managed to somewhat dampen the signal wave radiating from Cairo some 20km inside the southwestern Palestinian borders and just off the shore of the nation, for example. Sadly the SI-developed Psychic Nullifier prototypes, less reliable in this case than the Allied prototypes, which had been developed in Area 51 and brought out in DC, fried and blew up seconds after the Psychic Dominator stopped actively hammering the defensive bubbles. The DC prototype wound down to idling status after the wave passed without blowing up or breaking.

You would have to be stupid to think the Allies didn't start work on countermeasures immediately after the Washington DC Psychic Beacon. However, that didn't mean the damage was minor. Masses of people in the southernmost reaches of South America were brainwashed into believing Yuri was the second coming of Jesus, much of the northern parts of South America were unaffected as Yuri hadn't had them high on the priority list, figuring he'd take out his main potential opponents first. The Antarctic base was built to be discreet and to source an energy wave out to most of the Beacons in the Southern Hemisphere. He thus hadn't gotten to them before shutting the cascade down. However, large parts of the southern US and Central America devolved into rabid infighting as masses of evangelists attacked anyone who had successfully resisted the psychic influence with everything from guns and grenades to sticks and stones to fists and teeth. Isolated cases of families tearing themselves apart occurred in the northern states and Canada as some people fell to the psychic wave and the others had to neutralize them for spouting pro-Yuri nonsense. Unfortunately even blunt trauma neutralization did not have a 100% survival rate, but still they were neutralized.

The most ironic part of this whole event was that, as Harmony Jane Shepard, currently still four years old and at the phase of sitting around on a beanbag and reading history books with photos from Auschwitz while sucking on a lollipop, would discover twelve years later (or, thanks to time travel mechanics, 1954 years ago as of the Psychic Dominator Disaster), the evangelists were technically correct. It would only be through her actions as a teen that a third restoration of the entity once known to many as Jesus would be prevented, and it was in large part due to this reduction of division among religious lines that Humanity was able to put up an effective resistance during the Reaper War, despite ONI's best efforts to the contrary.

There was a good reason why terrorism stayed horribly low in the Middle East for the next two decades until the Sixth World War, first was that Nod followers were almost all able to resist the diffuse psychic wave, second was that other groups of zealots, regardless of religion, fell in droves to it. Some conspiracy theorists would claim that SI used this as an excuse to exterminate fundamentalist populations, particularly fundamentalist Jews and Muslims, in Palestine. Said conspiracy theorists of course never spent time crouching behind a number of destroyed vehicles while fanatics screaming religious slogans or pro-Yuri lines threw Molotov cocktails at the now-wrecked patrols. Some vehicle crews had been subverted and turned their guns on others and had to be put down within the vehicles before the mobs swarmed out from their habitations and attacked the rest. Said conspiracy theorists also never addressed the fact that lethality rates among various groups of subverted were very similar, and it was only the fact that Jews and Muslims made up a large majority of Palestine's population that made the numbers seem somewhat lopsided. There just weren't enough Christians or people of other religions for significant fundamentalist communities to aggregate, and as the problem mostly didn't get large enough to need lethal force except in fundamentalist communities, well… Most of the subverted in SI territories in fact survived as sleeping gas was used on them to make them languid if not knock them out—though there were some cases of unfortunate overdose lethality. However in Palestine, since the populace had been well-prepared for possible Syrian gas attacks, gas masks were commonplace and most of the subverted had to be put down the hard way. This could mean a rifle butt to the head or, if they were armed like many Palestinian and American citizens, particularly fundamentalists, were, real firepower.

* * *

Subsequent Archivists' Note: The tidbit regarding Jesus, Yuri and the Reapers was not available in editions of this Archive published prior to 2190 (every ten years, a new edition of any given part of the Archives MAY be published with newly known information, usually no such thing occurs). We Subsequent Archivists are not among the brave men and women who created the original version of the given part of the Archives, but we are here to make clarifications and bring forth new information as it becomes available.

* * *

_May, 1984_

"Is everyone still sane and under their own control?" Hannah asked, looking around the camera feed suspiciously.

Dugan cracked his knuckles and did a brief but amusing bit of what could have been his idea of street dancing, which helped break the tense mood of the room. Then he nodded to himself despite having semi-answered the sanity part of the question in the negative with the dance "Yep, seems our countermeasures worked… so how about taking those nukes off readiness, Shepard?" She tapped some buttons on-screen and Dugan was pleased to see the missile headed toward San Francisco self-destruct. "We're getting reports of riots in many cities as parts of the population turned against the rest, so I doubt Yuri's device worked. Eva, order the nukes taken off readiness, presidential authorization code White-Tango-Flak-Nutter-Omelette." Dugan had thought the methodology of using full words in a pass phrase in combination with standard letter codes for an authorization codeword (WTF NO in this case) an interesting idea and asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to adopt it after the last world war.

"I'm getting those from the news too, and the energy waveforms my satellites are picking up seem to have dissipated before they could cascade across the globe. Very well, I'm deactivating the rest of the missiles from readiness." She cut the transmission. She would go topside and check first, though she did not mention this, just in case this was all a huge hoax by Yuri to convince her he hadn't somehow actually pulled his plan off, the missiles would still fire in five minutes. If all was normal, she would come down and return the missiles to standby. Since deactivation took a bit of time and was not reflected to the HQ above, her subordinates would not be certain if the deactivation had occurred or not. Thus she would make sure they were all free of Yuri's taint before she closed the silo doors. How close the world came to Armageddon was never released to the public… until the publishing of this part of the SI Archives. The Shepards felt it was about time the descendants of the people living at the time knew how close one madman had been to destroying humanity.

Needless to say, the missiles were put back on standby and General Mark Shepard was ordered to take command of a hastily-assembled task force in San Francisco to prevent, at all costs, Yuri's forces from securing more power stations and attaching them to his isolated power grid. The man had been too paranoid to just hook his device up to the city power grid, which was his loss, of course, and the repairs to the installation would take time too. The task force began interdicting Yuri's forces in San Francisco in the morning of the 3rd of May, assimilating the remnants of local militias and police that had resisted the attackers who had emerged overnight seemingly from nowhere. They seized back control of the municipal power plants over the next day and bombarded Alcatraz with artillery to further damage the Psychic Dominator there, preventing the device from being restored to potential functionality.

As for the rest of the world, in Canada, Cameroon, North Korea, and other SI holdings, large flights of Arrows manufactured during the last war and in most cases brought back from European battlefields conducted search and destroy missions on April First to Second against Psychic Beacons that had been intended to relay the signal. The towers or structures able to conceal them were quite large and obvious after all, and satellite sensors had been developed in secret in the past year that could determine the approximate locations of the devices based on their emissions. Many aircraft were initially lost to Yuri's forces' ground fire as they flew low to search for the devices—there wasn't enough time to wait for the next spy satellite fly-over at first. South Korea expressed great anger over huge flights of Arrows intruding into their airspace until they were told "We must stop Yuri, shut the hell up and help us or we can assume you've all been mind-controlled. This is not an invasion, get it through your thick heads you idiots, ground forces are what take, well, ground!" A Psychic Beacon was discovered in the Socialist Republic of Korea and promptly blown up using air-to-ground missiles. Cameroon and Cuba also had their Psychic Beacons destroyed, the latter by both Cuban ground weapons and gunfire from US warships anchored at Guantanamo Bay.

Most of the world hammered out rather splotchy battle lines over the week after the Psychic Dominator Disaster began, as most people referred to it. Significant areas of nearly every country were under Yuri's control, but he was being pushed back on most fronts simply as the more controlled his thralls were, the less competent they were. However, most of the network of Psychic Beacons remained intact and for the most part functional, though they were not boosting the power of the Psychic Dominators and thus were of limited areas of effect. They could still maintain thralls to many times the distance at which they could ensnare them, hence were extremely annoying to eradicate.

It was in large part due to this that Jane Shepard found herself glad Harmony and Hermione were away visiting their grandparents in Canada and, with this event, would stay there under her sister's aegis, as she, her husband, and some other survivors found themselves in a London that wouldn't have looked too out of place were this a zombie apocalypse. Her personal guard forces and local SI operatives who had come into the open due to the emergency were with them, and she was now in charge of the resistance in London as Yuri tried to secure the city as much as he could for whatever nefarious purposes. They had to stay constantly on the move as Yuri's Initiates combed the city for survivors for whatever reason. She cursed her appointment as coordinator of European reconstruction for the past year after World War 4.

In the meantime, on the West Coast of North America, Mark Shepard's forces had ensured the destruction of the device on Alcatraz Island right up to Mark ordering his soldiers to have a group of CIA personnel taken out and shot on May 5th. They had wanted to salvage parts of the device for study, and Mark's reply was "We already have Psychic Beacon parts to study that work on the same principles and are dangerous enough, you are clearly under Yuri's thrall if you think this is a good idea. Men, take these compromised drones out and execute them." They had tried to go for weapons but were gunned down by soldiers Mark had on standby in the wings of the command building as soon as he knew the CIA people were coming. He kicked one of the corpses and spat on it, looking up at the soldiers who were waiting to clean up the mess "Men, this is what happens when you let slimy things like Yuri sink his claws into your mind, you don't care about humanity anymore, only how you may enforce your will unto others. Hell, given how intelligence agencies work, they're completely indistinguishable from collaborators on this sort of thing, so it's best to kill anyone trying to take parts from the device, just to be certain that they're not Yuri's thralls trying to salvage parts, got it?" The demolition charges that Mark used in several full repetitions (with bulldozers removing the finely pulverized rubble each time) to erase the device's foundations were probably over-doing it, but it was best to be sure, yes?

Of course, Mark received a conference call from Dugan and Carville, who was battling against Yuri's forces and thralls in South Carolina. Dugan told him that he had issued orders for the CIA to not try to acquire any Psychic Dominator parts, though schematics were permissible for analysis to see just how much theoretical yield the devices would have had. Carville applauded his gutsy action and wryly commented on the relationship Mark had started with Tanya Adams over the last year "I suppose you got an escape route planned out though, hmm? In case the CIA carries a grudge and all. Not easy to find a woman over age 50 who still looks that good… You didn't hear me say that, of course." Carville joked.

Mark wondered if the stress was getting to Carville, because this wasn't exactly a good time to be joking around like this… Then again, sometimes it was better to laugh loudly than scream endlessly in frustration, so Mark supposed it made good sense to troll a little.

* * *

**A/N**: The traits of feathered vs. leathered are actually controlled by a single genetic switch with 100% maternal imprinting deciding dominance (in other words, if your mother is a heterozygous leathered variant because her mother passed her the leathered gene while the father passed on the feathered gene, you may be either feathered or leathered depending on which critical gene you get, imprinted maternally, same if she was feathered). Even Psionic sentients are racist against those who are different, heh, and that's why most Veela and Succubi communities are pure-breeding, or at least not crossing over too often unless very distantly through ordinary humans. Yes, I decided to include Rosario + Vampire's anime rendition into this universe. To get an idea as to what the general body structure of a Hatchery Form female Immortal is like, refer to Ageha Kurono from Rosario + Vampire (her human form, no wings or claws on most Immortals!) for the approximate proportions and aspect ratios. Combat Forms are much less… "flabby" and higher in strength and speed, though of similar durability in bone structure, they carry singletons or at most twins unlike Hatchery Forms which normally at LEAST carry twins. Hannah and Jane both grew into Hatchery Forms due to not enough combat stress before and during puberty (…No there are no breast lasers involved here as per R+V, why anyone would ever think that is beyond me.) As for when the in-laws meet, expect Jane Shepard and Ageha Kurono to name the chapter in question "Red vs. Blue".

I am sorry if you don't like how I dealt with the Psychic Dominator Disaster, but this is the **only plausible mechanism I can think of as to why the Reapers don't just indoctrinate** (and I am saying that is permanent and irreversible, as ME canon says the more control, the less ability in the thralls as their memories and knowledge is erased) **whole planets and sic them on other planets (why the hell do they bother with visually obvious husks when it's far more devastating for defenders to know that any among them may be an indoctrinated?).** It's too much junk data to take into themselves and manage, which means you either end up with mindless drones that can barely move themselves due to having no personified knowledge to draw on, or you need to go for softer forms of mind control. Now, Yuri is a much smaller platform than a Reaper, less storage space, etc. to work with, hence he finds out the hard way that megalomania doesn't work and he needs to use softer mind influences if he doesn't want his head, or rather his body period, to explode.

REVIEW!


	2. LA Noire

A/N: I expected an explosive response for revealing that Yuri is an incarnation of Jesus and that he was associated with the Reapers (al-Nazirah is Nazareth in modern Arabic with phonetic conversion to English, 2000 years ago it was probably named similarly, so Nazara, Nazirah, po-tae-toe, po-ta-toe…).

**Anyhow, I posted the English/Chinese theme song names for the SI Verse Main Characters on my profile page. If you have any opinions on them, please tell me via reviews in the relevant fics' latest chapters, because I need more reviews to attract more readers :D**

In other news, I find it very telling that the first thing I thought of when I looked up _Attack on Titan_ on Wikipedia (I did not deign to watch it) was that the Titans are biological terror weapons created by the government to enforce control of where the human populace can be, namely, where the government can monitor all of them easily. Watching _Is This a Zombie?_ On the other hand… in **Episode 12 are we sure that Haruna with that getup didn't inspire the design of Gaige, the Mechromancer from Borderlands 2?**

* * *

Chapter 2: L.A. Noire

_Mid to Late May, 1984_

May 11th saw Mark Shepard wrapping up mop-up work in San Francisco as the few remaining Yuri forces went underground i.e. melted back into the populace as best they could. Given the number of fingers being pointed at others who may or may not have been enthralled at once point or another, a LOT of people still ended up being loaded onto ships headed for Vancouver, to internment camps. They were to be under a sort of house-arrest in the British Columbian desert, with a prefab city that had been erected over the past week providing room for them. Other than the pseudo-house-arrest (the city stretched for many kilometres in each direction), they weren't punished due to the fact that it was very likely a lot of them were actually innocent and merely subjected to this due to "coveting thy neighbour's wife" or something similar. As for giving them something to do… They were put to work on non-critical production like civilian clothing and toys in prefabricated buildings that were re-tooled, in addition to providing services for their local community (of course, quality control checked for sabotage).

May 11th was also the day the last of the Yuri holdouts disappeared from Canada, whether by going underground (usually failing to due to other witnesses pointing fingers) or extermination. On that day most of the Field Divisions that had been recalled from the Soviet Union before the outbreak of this disaster, or which had been restructured to be positioned in Canada, crossed the border into the United States to provide a large force to clamp down on the conservative and under-educated middle of the country while the east third of the country was fighting on hauntingly familiar battle lines roughly matching those of the American Civil War. The West Coast had required much more forceful measures by Yuri to have any degree of success, unlike the Bible Belt, so Mark Shepard was having a relatively easy time there.

Of the eighteen remaining active Field Divisions, restructuring and renaming had brought the First through Ninth to Canada, with the Tenth stationed in the Socialist Republic of Korea, and the Eleventh through Thirteenth in the State of Palestine. The 14th was the unit stationed in Algeria these days, while the 15th was re-branded as the Field Division stationed in Cameroon, though it wasn't very necessary since the Cameroon SDF could out-match any single nearby military in central Africa. The 16th, 17th and 18th had still been stationed in the USSR, helping General Mikhail Gorbanovich restore order in the country, but would have been, as per agreement at the end of World War Four, stationed in Germany once the job was done.

Now, the others were all grinding the insurrections in their countries to dust, but the First through Sixth were freed up to aid the Americans since the Canadian Army, counting reservists, was sufficient in numbers and equipment to handle any remaining peacekeeping beyond the ability of the remaining police forces. The Seventh through Ninth were stationed together on the east side of Niagara Falls, ready to dash south if the Americans needed help but also ready to move west should a pro-Yuri force approach via Michigan. Hannah had to both command the assaulting force and monitor home front activities for now, since Jane was still stuck in England fighting for her life. Her sister's impressive organizational skills had never quite struck Hannah as much as they did now, since even without Jane at the top making sure everything was running smoothly the various factories still ran well enough with the supply networks the redhead had assembled for both wartime and peacetime production.

They had received some disturbing reports from Los Angeles at the beginning of the Disaster though. It seemed Yuri had for whatever reason occupied the city and Hollywood. He'd been doing some stuff in the studios for some reason, perhaps trying to deploy researchers to study their subliminal messaging. But then something a bit more disturbing came up: there was a report of a Coast Guard cutter intercepting a ship doing organ smuggling out of Los Angeles. Since apparently the city wasn't strictly under mind control, it was possible that this harvesting operation was someone' way of making a quick penny out of the casualties from the combat in the city. However, the method of transport aroused a great deal of suspicion.

Most organs were only good for hours ad thus had to be airlifted, but there was some sort of stasis field in the containers these organs were stored in, which would hold until the containers were unsealed, apparently. This was thought to be a psychic-based technology that could prove very useful in medicine if it could be imitated… with ethical limits of course. And even more certain, as Hannah's rather satirical journal said, was the fact that the sufficiently rich could ignore these boundaries and buy organs even more readily if this technology became widely available. There was also quite a lot of transfusion packets, processed meat and leather products onboard for whatever reason, and neither of the latter could be identified by texture.

The truth, as Mark Shepard's army discovered when they rolled into Los Angeles on Sunday, May 13, 1984, was much less pleasant than the shipment suggested. Apparently Yuri was taking the denizens of the city, those who hadn't taken up arms for either side and/or those who had been captured, and processing them. Since it would be an awful waste if they were only used for blood and organs, they were also butchered for several black markets in parts of the world with demand for human parts or exotic meats and leathers. The investigation later on, the discovery that Yuri had been selling human parts not only in organ trafficking but also for Dark Magical rituals, would become one of the reasons why a clean-nuke test permission request by SI was approved by Britain for Christmas, 1991 on the minor British island known as the Isle of Drear. It was also why Harmony Shepard could have, a decade after the Psychic Dominator Disaster, easily followed through on her idle threat of turning any Wizarding World location not embedded within a metropolitan area into a radioactive crater.

In less roundabout terms, since the fundraising of Yuri included selling parts of processed people to "dark wizards" i.e. mentally ill psionic practitioners, the governments of the world had no qualms about extermination of said practitioners wherever and whenever they were found. In fact, quite a few of the cold-case mysterious deaths and disappearances of the next few years weren't due to "dark wizards", but due to killing of them by intelligence agencies just because they may have done business with Yuri.

That wasn't the point at the moment though, they had to stop this little fundraising operation of Yuri's, and since just hitting LA with a nuke wasn't an option—the Allies would not be able to explain away such mass killings to their citizens, nor did they want to bomb a city that wasn't completely brainwashed beyond repair—a ground invasion was necessary. After all, if the self-composed opinions of the rest of their civilians shifted without such impositions as mind control, it would be very hard to keep them down even with military dictatorship since the militaries would lose loyalty. They couldn't afford an insurrection while fighting Yuri, and thus they had to grit their teeth and grind their way into Los Angeles.

While nearing the city, Mark Shepard received an oddly-worded radio message indicating the LAX airport was still under local militia/civilian control. It read: "To the Allies, to the army of General Shepard. This is the LAX. SOS. We request help. Our defences cannot hold much longer." A quick phone call told him it was, in part, a reference to the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp back in the Second World War, probably by some history buff who was too excited to start screaming at the fact that he was almost living a zombie apocalypse. His forces were rolling into the city from the east and north, through the urban regions of San Bernandino and Santa Clarita respectively. Yuri's forces attempting to control the chokepoints of the mountainous terrain around LA proper were removed forcibly. In some of the narrower, steeper chokepoints, it was by mass bombing turning slopes into rubble that tanks could roll over. The ensuing battles around Hollywood for the north group where Yuri's forces had dug in to use the studios to make propaganda videos meant that the area would take years to again be a major filmmaking area, because almost all the facilities were completely levelled, whether by bombardment or fire. Unfortunately, the fire began to spread with the winds that circled three sides of Los Angeles with the mountains and began spreading east with the wind. By the time Mark's Eastern Force had broken through halfway from their jump-off point, to within fifty kilometres of Hollywood, the fires had spread 2 kilometres despite efforts to contain them. The army would encounter the flames five kilometres from their point of origin.

And then, of course, there were the civilians. Tragically, the soldiers could not afford using less-lethal ammunition since Yuri's troops assorted themselves within the groups of mind-controlled civilians that charged the Allied troops like a horde of zombies. And so they were mown down. Perhaps even Dante could not have described what the soldiers did to the Yuri soldiers once they'd shot them into pulp, but it is well known that many American soldiers who had fought in the Battle of Los Angeles kept the bald scalps of Yuri's Initiates as mementos, almost all of which were carved into by combat knives, showing messages that read "Never Again" or similar. It is well known that not one Initiate, nor any Yuri vehicle crew member, was immediately visually identifiable as human after the Allies pushed through Yuri's lines and finished "cleaning up" the battlefield. Over a million corpses deemed human (read: mind-controlled civilians) were piled together in a pit dug out by engineering-rigged IFVs at the cliffs beneath the Hollywood sign and buried. A hundred and fifty thousand more sacks of meat were ground into paste under the treads of tanks one crunch, pop or squelch at a time, or, for the more maddened platoons of Allied soldiers, under their combat boots one stomp at a time. There were no Yuri personnel captured alive, so no prisoner abuse occurred. The fact that this was the result of not counting anyone in Yuri's army as a person and therefore not as personnel nor as prisoner was, of course, a minor side-note at best.

Regardless of that, the battle's progress had included the eastern forces dousing several blocks' worth of buildings stretching north-south with water using fire hydrants so that the progress of the fire through the mostly wooden-framed dense urban housing could be halted as it moved east into the barrier, pushed by the wind. The transmission rate wasn't high, so the flames didn't spread in all directions uncontrollably as they had in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, but the flames did spread. The eastern force turned south to avoid crossing into the burning parts of the city and followed on the tail of the northern force which had advanced down highway 101 or highway 2 depending on who you asked, meeting up near Edendale, west of Dodger Stadium. It was there, at that stadium, that the first "Grinder" would be located, set up on the parking lot.

Mark Shepard would make himself a controversial figure after the discovery of the first "Grinder"… or as he referred to it, "Slaughterhouse One". This was because of what he officially encouraged his forces to do to any and all encountered Yuri forces. Some of his critics would claim he lost his mind and committed many war crimes during the week-and-a-half long campaign to take back Los Angeles, clearing it of all Yuri forces. His personal reply to a reporter while the battle was still going was "If you can stay completely rational in the face of such abomination without venting in one way or another at some point, then you are a psychopath, now get out of my sight, I have a campaign to win, and trash to take out of existence". The official line of course was that he never did any of the things his critics cited as examples of madness.

The unofficial line… well his subordinates did in fact spot him during coffee break one day using all the fingers of both hands to tear the scalp off a Yuri Clone who had been found and taken alive from Slaughterhouse Three, one of a few keeping captured civilians docile during disassembly. The thing was still alive at the time, with a Psi-suppressing field emitter in the room, though it eventually finally stopped twitching and making gurgling noises once he stopped smashing its skull in with his rifle butt which was now half-coated with brains and shattered bone fragments. He'd then ordered the guards outside the room to take out the waste to be burned and gone back to work from his somewhat long coffee break with a new wall decoration.

As for why Tanya continued to romance the guy without too much worry, well, she'd done much worse and understood why he'd done it. It only went to show that sufficient insanity could induce a lesser degree of madness in just about anyone, though it wasn't as if Hannah hadn't aptly demonstrated this with the other Allied Generals of the time using Stalin with great relish at the end of the Third World War.

* * *

Archivists' Note: Occasionally, we do in fact abridge some things for the sake of the stomachs of our readers, but if you must know, then let it be known that Tanya, after learning of the deaths of her parents due to the Psychic Dominator Disaster (granted they were quite old already, but even approximately second or third-rank members of the Old Families lived rather longer than average humans), captured a Yuri Clone. Then she stood behind the chair he was tied to and pried his skull in half while he still lived by digging her hands into his eye sockets and nasal passages, then proceeded to use the skull like a pincer to macerate the brain repeatedly into slop as it began to fall out the front of the opened head.

* * *

After capturing the first "Grinder" compound and discovering its purpose live on general channels that even civilians received, the need to liberate the LAX became more pressing. If hold-out militia/civilian forces were there in significant numbers, it was now even more imperative they be rescued as soon as possible. The 29th, 31st, 37th and 44th divisions of the US Army, formerly constituting the northern force pushing into California, proceeded west toward Santa Monica along Highway 10, while two more divisions pushed south nearer to the coast along Highway 405, rendezvousing at the junction of Highway 187 and 405 before rolling south, levelling resistance from Yuri forces and incorporating civilian holdouts as they fought street to street, house to house, and even room to room in some districts.

The sound of gunfire and the screaming of wounded filled the streets of Los Angeles, the civilians having been motivated by broadcasts about the Grinders to fight harder in resistance. While the army fanned out to search out survivors, they could not afford to divide their forces up too much or risk being taken down piecemeal by marauding bands of Yuri's tank forces and attached infantry elements. Thus many calls for aid had to go unanswered and only about sixty percent of the known pockets were liberated before they were crushed. The army was using its radar systems to pick up on cell phone dial attempts, for while many compromised cell towers were returning busy tones to call attempts the army could still pick up the signal sources and triangulate. Yet still, many hundreds of thousands of civilians would die fighting for their lives before the week ended.

Mark received a transmission just after midnight in the early hours of May 16th while his armies were advancing down the axis of Highway 405 i.e. the San Diego Freeway and nearing Highway 187, a mere six kilometres from the LAX, but with the entrenched enemy in the way and hordes of mind-controlled thralls to put down, hordes that thickened as they proceeded as the mindless tide was ordered north… it would take almost another day before they could reach the airport. It read "CDN Navy Pacific Fleet has arrived off the coast of Santa Cruz Island, heading east and preparing for landing operations at dawn. Please designate a landing zone. Default target is the LAX."

Santa Cruz Island was a mere 150 km from the LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport. If they landed in the typical fashion of SI armour swarming ashore from the sterns of warships they could relieve the holdouts at the LAX within ten minutes of coming ashore, but the problem for that was that the enemy had to be unprepared (or under constant heavy suppression while part of the fleet backed up along the shore), and the encirclement at the LAX would be anything but unprepared. Mark's response was "Understood, I recommend the Marina just north of the LAX if you are to unload heavy vehicles." He was surprised when, instead of the expected Corvettes turning around and suppressing shore installations via rocket artillery and machine gun fire from the rear deck or firing over their shoulders from the other weapons while Frigates provided firepower from off-shore, his forces reported sighting dedicated Amphibious Assault Ships making the landings.

The Canadian Navy had wanted a cheaper solution to landing troops than Corvettes, which were a considerable amount of firepower to turn around and leave nearly impotent in terms of firing directly rearward. Thus they had engineered near the end of the last war, based on the hulls of the N-EC-1975B Corvette and N-EA-1960D, the N-LH-1982A and N-LL-1982A. The latter was intended to land infantry or a single PAV, with relatively minor changes to the hull, while the former could beach dozens of tanks at once. The EA-1960D patrol boat's very shallow draft meant the PAV could drive off the rear end of the derived LL-1982A in very shallow water and not plough its front into the beach bottom via its ability to swim lifting the front of the vehicle enough, then drive along the bottom or swim onto the shore to provide basic direct fire support for Marines.

The LH-1982A (Landing Craft, Heavy, Model A) mounted one large gun turret with internal ammo stowage for a WAG-150 series howitzer on the mid line practically on the bow, several smaller-calibre guns in turrets, and mortars, but they lacked missile armament or rocket artillery to save weight. It also lacked hull magazines, the ammunition being stored inside the turrets to save room in the hull. The superstructure was greatly abbreviated due to far fewer weapons mounts, and was displaced toward the front. The rear deck was used as extra cargo space, the chopper elevator was retained and used to move cargo between this deck and the main hold in the hull. The front of the hull was the part that opened on these ships, unlike the original Corvettes' stern entrance, and the hold (with a few cross-walls with seal-able doors) ran the entire length of the hull except the engine rooms, going under the magazine and such. As a result the ships weren't exactly very structurally sound and weren't very damage resistant compared to the original EC-1975B.

The Shepards had decided to use these designations in their own documentation to refer to the ships as the Canadian navy had been creating the designs. As for why the Canadians had no problem with adopting them, well, just about every single major system on the ships/boats had a Maple Leaf With Bars stencilled on somewhere, and the rest of their Navy followed the naming conventions of the power that had grown from within the country to beyond them. For the most part, given the glowing achievements SI had accomplished both at home and abroad, Canadians were proud (and had been since the Second World War) that their country had given rise to such a powerful and righteous international organization. The fact that the Shepards were abominably loud about stopping personality cults and regularly reminding the populace to question everything was generally quite helpful to their confidence in the two sisters that had led them through the fire and flames time and time again whenever some petty dictator or other would threaten their freedom.

The landings went fairly well, the hulls and turrets of the N-LH-1982As being adequate to absorb what fire could still come at them form the shore once it had been raked over by two volleys of gunfire and enormous salvos of rockets from the real warships. The tanks stormed the west edge of the LAX encirclement and ran roughshod over the Yuri forces stationed there while the infantry attacked enemy anti-tank teams. The PAVs had been left on the rear decks of the heavy landing ships since they weren't useful in clearing these small spaces among the cleared but very uneven ground between the beach and LAX in the southern stretch of the LZ (A/N: Google Earth FTW) where there was only enough room for a tank and accompanying infantry. Besides, they were meant to provide mobility to the infantry, which would be needed at a later stages of the operation to retake Los Angeles before sweeping east to attack the deranged psychopaths that seemed to make up the majority of the Bible Belt states after the Psychic Dominators fired. It would later prove to be a monumental mistake that they just destroyed the Psychic Beacons where they could be found and mostly let the survivors go back to their normal lives, but that is for another chapter in humanity's history.

The forces coming ashore weren't standard SI Army forces this time. These were Canadian Army forces pressed into service as Marines (their training had included amphibious operations enough that it wasn't that disastrous). They had sailed out of Vancouver, leaving the final stages of the securing of the mountains of British Columbia to troops who were technically still in training. They were comparably trained, but less psychologically resilient than the veteran SI Army troops who had come fresh from the Fourth World War. This was why they sustained slightly higher than necessary casualties while striking into the LAX facilities… and why when it turned out this particular hold-out was partly a fake they were taken by surprise. The true hold-outs, worn down by many days of constant fighting for their lives, were also shocked but gunned down the fakes quickly enough. Unfortunately, just to make sure, they still all ended up imprisoned in the cargo holds of a couple heavy landing ships that off-loaded all their supplies and ammunition (i.e. disarmed themselves just in case) and were escorted back north by US Coast Guard warships.

Once the fake holdouts had turned their true colours on their rescuers combat had devolved to hand to hand brawling, with grenades and guns thrown and fired at ranges where the combatants could see the whites of each others' eyes. Bayonets, knives, boots, fists, chairs, airport line pole thingies, souvenirs, pens, pencils, nothing was beyond the scope of the fighting, and the splattering of blood and shredded, blasted meat seeped into every crack in the paint of the LAX's walls. It would take several weeks after it was retaken for the smell of death and decaying meat to leave the LAX. Years after the fact, even after renovations, the soldiers and civilians who had fought for their lives inside the installation would still scent blood whenever they passed through the airport. They would always scent it even if it was a brief wait for a connecting flight, and in a part of the airport where they themselves had not done battle.

The battle for the LAX lasted until the Americans broke through from the north while the Canadian troops had been holding their beachhead and keeping the runways clear for use as a kill zone. There was now the problem of removing the thousands of civilian corpses that littered the southern runways before any aircraft could come in with additional reinforcements or to serve as close air support. This was accomplished by T-1962D tanks and their dozer blades. The T-1962 series had been the MBT of the Canadian Army since its introduction (the 1945 series had been it before then, since the Canadian Army had disliked the heavy weight of the T-1955 series) and meant many Canadians, thanks to regular weapons development news releases, were annoyed at the Americans for producing what at least looked like an imitation under the XM1 label.

As for why the Americans took so long to get to the airport, arriving in the evening hours of May 16th, it was because all the bridges over Ballona Creek were wrecked. The soldiers and vehicles of the Americans had to slosh across the filthy ditch before pushing south, and it had taken quite some effort to take the other side of the ditch so that their vehicles could cross safely, in large part thanks to the landmines planted in the murky water and shore muck making it difficult to get infantry across. The ditch, which resembled a very long tank trap, had been part of why Mark had agreed with the initial LZ choice of the Canadians, instead of asking them to land further south and fight their way north to converge at the airport. More critically, the installation labelled thereafter on the tactical maps as "Slaughterhouse Two" was discovered and liberated at Hughes Airport after crossing the creek.

After the LAX was secured as of the evening of May 16th, the eastern group of the allied army, reported that they were nearing the center of the district of Downey, having made roughly 20 kilometres of progress with the efforts of a little over eighty thousand Americans. The western group, one hundred and twenty thousand strong thanks to the Highway 405 reinforcements, planned to clear out the Inglewood district and sweep the area south of their Highway 10 defence line—the area north of it had been cleared as they moved west to rendezvous with the Highway 405 force. They were now reinforced by the forty thousand Canadians who had come ashore during the day, who would be responsible for securing the Highway 105 axis and preventing any Yuri forces from escaping.

That operation was conducted overnight on May 16th, using the military's edge of night vision equipment against the mind-controlled civilians' lack thereof. The real civilians had been warned by radio to lay low if able. In a single day the Allies managed to clear nearly 150 square kilometres of city since resistance had slackened, most of the local supply of hostiles expended in the previous battles in surrounding districts and most of the rest eliminated by civilian holdouts. Even though many of the holdouts had looted and in some cases may have committed first-degree murder to steal from other holdouts, they were mostly simply shipped to the rear instead of investigated, since the Allies didn't have the time to deal with that crap for now.

It would be on May 17th, since resistance was light in Torrance and Carson districts, that the next "Grinder" would be found near Long Beach Airport and the first live Yuri Clone would be captured from amongst the rubble after the facility was bombarded. The CIA was given a day to work him over with Canadian Army representatives present, and neither group got anything out of him. Late on May 18th, Mark Shepard took the infamous coffee break that provided him with a wall decoration that was hard to miss and gave him a reputation as a someone willing to do trash duty, much like Carville's reputation after WW3.

The rest of the contiguous metropolitan area, going under different district names, was systematically swept from north to south over the next week, with 3 whole days spent on the distant suburbs in the east half of the county of Orange. The northern "branch" of the sprawling urban area of LA, which had been the approach axis for the eastern Allied force, had already been effectively cleared. However, crime rates from un-evacuated survivors were now soaring and armoured forces had to be brought in on May 22nd to quell rampant looting and shoot-outs between looter groups in the north. Mark was forced to make a quarter of his army (they couldn't send the Canadians for political reasons) turn back to put down the rioting, though this wasn't necessarily a bad thing since in suburbs large numbers were actually not much of an advantage due to narrow engagement fronts. This same sort of behaviour would be observed repeatedly after each major, widespread disaster in American history, be they hurricanes, war, flooding or whatever.

After finally defeating Yuri's forces in the LA area, Mark contacted the San Diego facilities of the US Navy to ask why the garrison there could not send any forces north to assist in clearing LA. It seemed the Navy deemed San Diego too important to reduce the garrison in case pro-Yuri forces made a push west from Phoenix, Arizona, where a Psychic Beacon had been detected after much analysis of available satellite data. That Psychic Beacon partly explained why Los Angeles had been affected so significantly by the Psychic Dominator. Fortunately, the Psychic Beacon could be resisted indefinitely by prepared minds. That meant a quick blitz through the city should get the job done…

There were a couple problems with that idea. Firstly: The Bible Belt had spread its toxic fascist influences west into Arizona during and after the Third World War when the arrogance of white men made them feel threatened by two particular women being regarded by many all over the world as messiahs. Secondly: A majority of the Bible Belt had done one of three things: devolved into deranged fanatics utterly convinced that Yuri was the Second Coming of Jesus, were using the Psychic Dominator Disaster to go about their agenda of hatred and intolerance, or hopping on the bandwagon so they wouldn't get killed. Several reverends had already been crucified or lynched as examples for those who refused to submit to hatred.

One good thing came out of it though, as Mark noted when the Canadian troops fighting under his banner blitzed around and took up defensive positions on the east side of Phoenix, leaving the Americans to sort the city out. "Well, we should have less of these rabid ghost cosplayers running around after this war." He'd said as he stomped on the head covering of a tied-up KKK member they had finished interrogating after capturing him and his lot while they were attacking another group of surviving, free civilians. There was a crunch beneath his boot, the white cloth was stained red from seeping of fluid through it and the body twitched slightly before going limp. Another stomp produced a larger red stain, a louder crunching, and some red slush splattering out from the bottom of the hood. "Take the Yuri sympathizer trash out of my sight."

Mind-controlled people throughout the Bible Belt were being funnelled to the borders and expended there to bleed American manpower and morale alike. The Midwest states were being hammered down by the SI First through Sixth Field Divisions, the western borders of the Belt being stormed by Mark Shepard's army, and the east side, where the majority of the hostiles were, being ground to dust by Carville's forces. Sadly, while genuine fanatics were mostly wiped out as a result, many of the more dangerous, crafty, and generally evil people would survive by changing sides after they were no longer under direct mind control and seeing that Yuri's influences were being pushed back, but those consequences were yet far off in the future. For now the main concern was taking back the American South, regardless of massive collateral damage statistics from the local reactionary (read: rabid) forces.

To quote President Dugan in his next election campaign "I understand that many people hate me for allowing our military to do its utmost to free this country from the perverse, megalomaniacal desire for control by Yuri. I can only say that I believe in the words of the great Patrick Henry, 'Give me liberty, or give me death!' I can only say that I could not allow any man, any power, to enslave us people of the Free World. It was mandatory that we reverse the mind control by destroying the machines enforcing it as soon as possible. He who would choose security over liberty deserves neither." He lost, because he lost the south. The Psychic Dominator Disaster was thus cited by many as the conception of the true rise of the Republicans' Southern Strategy, appealing to hatred, fear, and the Arrogance of Men. Thus it could be said that World War Six had a fuse sixteen years long.

* * *

It took until the end of May, ten full days, to take back Arizona even after destroying the Psychic Beacon inside the Arizona State University Activity Center, later renamed the Wells Fargo Arena. That had raised the question of how they could have set it up there without anyone noticing, and it was believed that the university may have been compromised or just paid enough to look the other way regardless of what was being done. Well, it was either that or American police sometimes minded too much of their own business and were too wary of possible involvement of big money instead of investigating suspicious-looking things. Every police force had that sort of problem, so it wasn't their fault, it had to be some aspect of the university that had been compromised. The investigation later said it was done via seemingly legitimate documents that no one questioned which closed down the arena for long enough to build the thing inside, out of the public eye.

In the meantime, Carville was making headway into Virginia in the face of what seemed to be the entire south-eastern seaboard's population as resistance. The next census would show more than seventy percent local population depletion in areas the army battled their way through and comparable levels of depletion in where the mind-controlled people were drawn from. Sadly for the world, with the unrestricted reproduction of the surviving conservatives in these regions and their brainwashing programs full of the Arrogance of (literally) Men, this population would be replaced disturbingly quickly. As a side note, combat footage from the fighting here was later used as reference points for many zombie video games and films where the zombies were still smart enough to use weapons.

Disgustingly, the US Army didn't even have to destroy that many Psychic Beacons due to how soft these people were to mental attack. Their fervent belief that only their religious deity could use these psychic powers as well as dismissal of the WW4 mind-control events meant they had almost zero resistance to psychic attack, and thus Yuri hadn't needed to plant that many Psychic Beacons to act as relays. For years afterward, there would occasionally be people in the Bible Belt that preached that the governments of the world had been only putting up a futile resistance against the Judgement. They were not taken all that seriously. Their descendant fanatics were not thoroughly exterminated until the Reaper War when they again went completely rabid over the Apocalypse.

There was however one bastion in the Deep South of resistance, one place where the majority of the population were resistant, paranoid, and generally cynical. This city was almost a ghost town due to the horrendous collateral civilian casualty rate in the last major battle for it. This city was St. Louis. This city was also beginning to run low on food supplies and would need relief within the next week. Fortunately, SI First through Sixth Field Divisions were approximately four days away slaughtering their path down the Mississippi.

* * *

A/N: Writing all this brutality and general worthlessness of humanity is so depressing that I watched a couple episodes of Magical Girl type animes since they're less gloomy than say _Is This A Zombie?_ Then again it's making me think of Harmony possibly derogatorily referring to WW5 as "The Precure War" due to the retarded Jap program called "Rocket Angels" and the IJA's many transforming weapons systems.

**Damrhein**: Wikipedia page for a given year, take events I think are reasonably important or might end up in international news so the Shepards would say something about it, put in as either a sentence or a longer paragraph to explain how things happened and the repercussions.

**Illuviar**: Thanks!

**Just a Crazy-Man**: Nice to see you back.

**Edvin**: Thanks.

REVIEW!


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